Japanese and other Asian languages are composed of thousands of characters, but only about a hundred keys exist on a typical keyboard. In a computer system adapted for such a language, a word may be input through a combination of phonetic inputs. The user types the sound of the word into the keyboard, the user's inputs are displayed on the screen, and the user requests a front end processor to Ad supply different word choices that sound the same but have different meanings. A system typically displays any one of these thousands of characters on a display screen in a graphical space that typically has a pixel resolution of 16.times.16 or fewer pixels per character. In such a small space, one character is very hard to distinguish from another.
Field of the Invention
The invention relates to text processing; in particular the invention relates to user input of information for a text processing system in a language having a large number of characters.